iOS 8 is likely to supercharge the functionality of Apple’s iPad with a new split-screen multitasking feature, according to sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development. These people say that the feature will allow iPad users to run and interact with two iPad applications at once. Up until now, each iPad application either developed by Apple or available on the App Store is only usable individually in a full-screen view.

iPad Air 2

The ability to use multiple applications simultaneously on a tablet’s display takes a page out of Microsoft’s playbook. Microsoft’s Surface line of tablets has a popular “snap” multitasking feature that allows customers to snap multiple apps onto the screen for simultaneous usage. The feature is popular in the enterprise and in environments where users need to handle multiple tasks at the same time.

Microsoft has even released an ad comparing multitasking features for the Surface and iPad:

The feature has opened up the door for the Surface to be a true laptop replacement, and will further herald the iPad as Apple’s vision of the future for mobile computing.

In addition to allowing for two iPad apps to be used at the same time, the feature is designed to allow for apps to more easily interact, according to the sources. For example, a user may be able to drag content, such as text, video, or images, from one app to another. Apple is said to be developing capabilities for developers to be able to design their apps to interact with each other. This functionality may mean that Apple is finally ready to enable “XPC” support in iOS (or improved inter-app communication), which means that developers could design App Store apps that could share content.

A split-screen iPad multitasking feature has been requested by iPad fans for several years and some designers have even designed sample user-interfaces, unofficial tweaks, and videos for how they would like the feature to function. The feature is said to be designed with the 9.7-inch iPad display in mind, and it is unclear if the feature will work on the smaller-screened iPad mini. The feature is said to work exclusively in landscape mode. The feature may also be key to a larger-screened iPad, which Apple is actively developing for a launch either later this year or in 2015.

Besides the few aforementioned new applications, Apple is focusing on speed and performance enhancements as well as user-interface refinements in iOS 8. As one source said, “think of iOS 8 as being what OS X Mavericks was to OS X last year:” an update with several refinements, a few new apps, and new ways of handling tasks. Apple will officially unwrap iOS 8, as well as a redesigned version of the Mac operating system, at a keynote address on June 2nd, and we will have full coverage of the event as well as new information about the announcements as we hear it.

Why is multitasking on a 32 bit OS a joke? Aside from the fullscreen app debacle, I’ve been able to multitask fairly well on both iOS and Android (probably better on Android thanks to actionable notifications and a more lenient policy on background activity).

Lenient policy of background activity? iOS 7 SDK offers any and all sensible background activity function. Android lets devs create apps that run in the background the way hackers do when they release them on Cydia….memory and battery drain galore….without an ounce of logic in place. Thats not a “feature” of Android apps, its a severe flaw.

It doesn’t allow “any and all sensible background activity to run” have you actually used the iOS7 SDK before? iOS 7 has made the self inflicted situation better for iOS but it by no means has completely mitigated it. Additionally iOS 7 has significantly more battery drain issues than the current version of Android as Android (out of necessity granted) has more intelligent memory and resource management logic. This hasn’t always been the case mind you, but it is indeed the current state of affairs.

The world RAN on Windows XP for a while. You’ll notice how much XP infrastructure there STILL is because they can’t upgrade whole factories to Windows 7 or 8 without massive overalls of hardware AND software. Its a joke.

That trend is dying. Servers are all going with Linux. Creative Pros go with Mac. Office Pros get second equipment with a mix bag of Windows. Users are going Mobile.

Totally agree. All the software my office uses will only run on windows. Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, TKsolver and all our other design software. I am sure it is different in a graphics world, but I have never heard of a single type of engineering software that runs on a mac.

Keith, absolutely!
Mac users pride themselves of knowing “something”, but in reality they know very little technical details.
“Restart your Mac” or “Call Apple support” represents their depth-of-knowledge.
Its hilarious.
However on a PC, you’re ‘forced’ to know the technical details because so much needs tweeking and fixing, so in this regard its a good thing that PC’s never were as good as Macs in usability.
Much cheaper and that is why businesses and the like use PC’s.
(Coming from someone who used PC’s +25 years before switching to Mac)

The pricing point was a legitimate point to make. As to the rest of your post, that might be the dumbest defense of a product that I have ever heard. “Thank God it sucks! It forces us to learn how to fix it!” This type of defense would not work for any other product on the planet and it doesn’t work here.

“Thank God that shampoo makes my skin breakout. Now I know how to treat acne!”
“I’m glad that food is so fattening. It forces me to work out!”
“Is anyone else excited that are cruise ship sank? Now we get to swim and play Survivor!”

Seldomly do PC’s work as well as Macs without some kind of technical tweeking or ‘fixing’.
I wasn’t trying to defend anything that PC’s are better than Macs (they’re not)

The price & availability of software (especiailly software custom tailored) has for many years dictated why PC’s have such a powerful threshold.
I’m pretty sure (in my opinion) that if Steve Jobs had not been oustered in 1985, then the world probably would have looked different.

I once asked my ex-boss “why don’t we get Macs and replace all our PC’s, they don’t give us shit and we have to dedicate man-power to fixing and maintenance”
His response:
“This is a serious company, not a hobby shop”

64 bit means that a processor can store up to 2^64 bytes of info at once. FYI: Apple had already stopped os x updates for 32-bit macs in 2011, 32 bit Devices that run Windows 8.1 and are eligible for windows are still being made. Basically Apple has finished the Mac’s transition to 64 bit. So mac had since 2011 way more to do with 64-bit than windows does right now

You might want to research what you’re talking about before posting stuff like this.

We’ve been multi-tasking on 32-bit OSes and 16-bit OSes without any issues for decades.

In addition, 32-bit/64-bit is unrelated to multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is dependent of how the kernel is built. 32-bit/64-bit kernels does not have an advantage of each other in terms of multi-tasking.

No. The split-screen solution is horrible. The reason why apps on the iOS-platform is so great is because the developers make them specifically for the that screen-size.
If you make the screen half the size (which you do when you split the screen between two apps), the buttons would be half the size. How would this be on a iPad Mini?

Petter, Apple has been pushing scaleable app design for awhile, and it will become much more important with presumed multiple iPhone screen sizes, and will make developing for multiple sizes/resolutions easier. So that being said, those scaleable designs would likely be able to change and scale with multitasking windows easier.

How have they been pushing for scalable apps? In one keynote they said that the one-app-fits-all-screens solution is whats making the Android-tablet experience as bad as it is.
And for the larger iPhone. It’s not going to happen for the same reason. Also: the iPhone is a device created to control with one hand. See how your thumb fits perfectly diagonally across the screen?
It’s not like multitasking is impossible in iOS. Doubleclicking the home-button and jumping between apps is like cmd + tab on a mac. I just don’t understand why anybody would think that Apple would sacrifice usability for a marketing scheme.

Being scalable and being 1 size fits all is COMPLETELY different Petter. Apple mentioned in Keynotes about Android apps for tablets being stretched to fill, not scalable… Stretch to fill (1 size fits all) means that the UI elements would stay completely the same regardless of screen size, it would just be stretched for larger sizes but the extra screen real estate isn’t being taken advantage of. “Scalable” is complete different in that the system would recognize the screen size it is being portrayed on and automatically adjust the layout to use the space more efficiently. In this way you could make one app but if it’s at a 4″ size the layout would be 1 way and if on a larger screen it would display a rearranged UI. Android actually does this now and it does it better than iOS at the moment unfortunately. The problem with Android is that this is not required, so developers of many Android apps take the lazy way out and just stretch their apps instead of go the extra mile to make the UI scalable with resolution/UI element placement logic.

Additionally Petter, if you look at any of the last 2 years of iOS WWDC classes you will hear MANY MANY mentions from the Apple instructors that you should be designing your apps to be scalable.

rahhbriley - 4 years ago

Michael puts it well here Petter. The distinction between scaleable and stretched to fill is a big one. The comment you are referring to at the Keynote is addressing stretching mobile apps to fit different phone screen sizes and tablets. We are not advocating for that. There is a big difference. It’s a simple analogy, but when I build emails I build only one email, but it is set to recognize the device it is being view from, and actually alters the appearance, elements, button sizes, etc appropriately. It doesn’t just shrink the same email down for mobile, it alters it. That is what Apple has been pushing. Breifly mentioned during iOS 6, and pushed pretty hard at WWDC in 2013 with iOS 7.

The advantage being, the developer could make one app and have it work on iPad with and without Retina, iPad mini with and without Retina, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and the presumed new iPhone 6 size(s) (and possibly Apple TV). They would all look different, not just the same app stretched to fill the screen. This makes it so they don’t have to build different iterations for each, annnnd so that when Apple introduces new resolutions or sizes, their apps will work right out of the gate instead of needing to update it again.

Well I guess its a good thing for all that you are just GUESSING because you can’t presume to know what it would really look like or how it will work.

For all you know it won’t be a way of using the iPad normally, but more of an on demand feature, where you can call up a certain App based on a certain action within another App. Allowing temporary drag and drop or copy and paste actions.

This makes a lot more sense than going back and forth between Apps for certain tasks.

This also is not meant to accommodate the doofus that wants to ‘watch’ a Video while browsing Safari.

Think about this logically for a second. If you held the iPad in landscape, you could have two apps in their portrait mode UI next to each other. However, the size of the portrait mode UI would likely have to shrink a little bit, but luckily on the 9.7″ iPad all elements appear slightly larger in size than their iPhone counterparts. So what you would end up with is basically two portrait mode apps next to each other with buttons and other UI elements roughly similar in size to the iPhone and iPad Mini UI elements.

Seems like it would work just fine. And thats also likely why it will only be a feature for the iPad Air and not the Mini.

As for scaleable app design, yes Apple has in fact been pushing this more recently. They’ve been “encouraging” developers to adopt AutoLayout in iOS 7 apps, they practically forced it down every developers throats at WWDC13 Sessions last year. So while my idea above might work, its very likely they have thought this through a lot better than I can and will have the feature working great. Developers will obviously need to update applications to support the new feature, so don’t think of current apps, they’ll be updated and redesigned for a split screen view.

The idea of surface’s advertisement is OK. However, if you need to take notes while recording video, your desk has to be higher than the blackboard, which is ridicules (since the blackboard will be blocked by other desks). This is just a makeup video. MS should have used better examples.

People seem to forget that Apple is known for being fashionably late on a consistent basis. They took their time with copy & paste, 4G and reportedly large screens but when they enter into a market segment that everyone else has been playing in for years they usually do it better than anyone else.

Kind of almost proud of Apple for not adding this in a rush just because Microsoft and Samsung bragged about multitasking. Instead they continue to sell iPads at rates far and away better than anyone else without these so-called killer features.

I still don’t think Apple will ever implement multiple logins but if we see it at all that’ll be in iOS 9.

There are some things I don’t like, but overall I like your concept better than the one the article ran with.

It’s really disappointing to me that all the web sites have picked that awful concept for the announcement of this news. Since they all chose the same video, I am sure there are millions of folks this morning that think it will work exactly that way and that it’s actually Apple’s concept.

while i like the general concept and would love a distinct iPhone implementation of this, it’s hard for me to truly accept it as a viable concept because you forgot to display the on-screen keyboard for your note taking app, which would pretty much leave you with a single line of readable text while it was still in view. It will be interesting to see how Apple and other developers could possibly take these caveats into consideration if they do actually roll this out.

I don’t think that either of those features would really help on iOS. The timer coalescing feature is related to Intel’s chips. Apple might be doing something very similar on iOS with their own chips already.

App Nap doesn’t apply to iOS because apps are already asleep when they are not being shown. That’s more of an iOS feature that was brought over to OSX.

yes, please!!! i was surprised to see that this wasn’t a feature included in iOS 7 directly considering the naming conventions and technologies used. seeing as how there are quite a few (rather poorly implemented and clumsy) apps that do this same thing, it would be nice to see a more direct tie-in between OS X and iOS. would save me quite the hassle.

Personally, I’m stoked for this. It makes the iPad 10000x more usable. I’m an app developer, and using the auto-layout stuff makes it super simple to account for this. Check out my free app to get organized and declutter paperwork, PaperBox! http://www.gopaperbox.com

Yeah, no, sorry, not a Samsung feature. We’re already full up on FUDge, thanks.

natevancouver - 4 years ago

It’s not that Samsung’s multi-window feature is bad, it’s that it needs to be integrated at the OS level by Google.

Why hasn’t Google or Apple done this yet? Is it because they are too dumb to figure out how to do it?

I assure you, both companies have multiple variants of multi-window support running in their labs. They haven’t done it yet because they want to *get it right* and because, once released at the OS level, many apps will be built around it and therefore it will be extremely difficult to fix any fundamental mistakes in the design of the feature.

It looks like Apple is ready to pull the trigger, and I suspect Google is ready too. No one is “copying” anyone. You can bet they have been working hard on this for at least two years.

Oh this article is brilliant. Not one mention of Samsung having this since the galaxy s3…not one mention of Samsung at all in fact. Must not ever mention the dreaded Samsung having a feature years before Apple – might being up the “C” word. Ie. Copy? Instead the language used is Apple has “matched” Microsoft. LOL. Then the typical comments about “oh I’m glad apple waited to do this properly”. The prob for apple is, as has been with every other feature they co….I mean matched, is old hardware will crawl and battery life will be destroyed when these “advancements” are made…if they do in fact add this to older hardware. Apple should try and do multi tasking right before they attempt split screen multi tasking.

This article is not a rendition of what features are copied from Samsung. Sure, the author could have mentioned it, but its not so important. This article is about Apple implementing split screen and what it could mean. This isn’t about comparing.

If it was Samsung that “matched” crApple you all know what the lead would be.
Face it, this site is a biased circle jerk and its readers are the unfortunate victims because they swallow it all without question.

Not many people will use the split screen feature. It will be like Spaces in Mac OS X. I don’t know why many seem to ignore Spaces, I think it is a fantastic feature, but for so many they just do not bother with it.

You are absolutely right. There are some many excited commenters in this thread who believe that they are going to be using this feature. In fact, even with 27″ iMac not to many people place two windows side be side and work with both apps simultaneously. I think this feature is only needed in the enterprise.

Dumb…please just add the ability to use Multiple User Accounts, each with different apps, home screen, etc. and then it can truly replace a laptop. Other than that, it’s just an expensive, useless toy.

I agree! With the fingerprint sensor it would be nice to unlock the iPad and load settings for the fingerprint owner, such as email/facebook/twitter accounts, browser history, apps on the screen etc
Come on Apple!

I think this is a great new feature that Apple needs to bring some innovation to the iPad. Now just add a Wacom digitizer and pen like the Surface Pro and you’ll be right back on top.

Being able to draw, write, etc on an iPad without having to resort to a clumsy finger, a clumsy crayon sized stylus, or an expensive Bluetooth addon that is poorly implemented would be great.

And to you naysayers, you wouldn’t have to use it. There are plenty of people who want it, though, and it would add a lot of productivity to the iPad. Yes, your finger would be used mostly in day to day activities, but to be able to write meeting notes, paint in an art app, take notes in class that require writing calculations, drawing schematics or mechanisms, etc would be a wonderful addition and a great way to go completely paperless.

Most likely this is going to work only in a new larger screen iPad (if that one is going to be released at all).

Here are some technical reasons:

1) The current landscape mode on the iPad Air has a width of 2048 px. If you divide it by 2, you will get 1024px. Meanwhile the portrait mode currently has a width of 1536px, which is much larger. So if you basically scale the current apps down to fit this ‘split-screen mode’, images will be scaled down by 1.5 and will look worse because of that, but what is more important is that UI elements will be small too, making it really hard to interact with these elements. Which is not what Apple suggests in its iOS Human Interface Guidelines.

2) Some people here said that the Auto Layout API which is being currently pushed by Apple may allow existing apps to be scaled down with the size of UI elements staying the same. This is not going to happen, because Auto Layout is currently used by developers to handle LARGER screens, not SMALLER. This is because when you start designing your UI and UX, you have some base screen size in mind that you start to develop from. You put all your UI elements in place, make sure that they meet the guidelines, have at least minimum size/font and start using this elements with Auto Layout, so they can be repositioned or even stretched when there is a larger screen.

To sum it up, there are too many technical problems for this to be implemented in the current iPads.

So, most likely, this is going to be a ‘killer-feature’ of the new larger screen iPad Pro or whatever it is going to be called. Larger screen and larger resolution of this new iPad, especially if is going to be 3072×2304 will actually help to handle the existing apps in their current portrait resolution without any problems.

The video is actually completely inaccurate. I record all the time with my iPhone and switch into other apps to do things. The recording keeps happening. Maybe Microsoft should research this stuff before making claims in their ads.

I posted this before, but half the iPad resolution is 1536×1024, which at 326PPI makes a 5.7″ screen (half the iPad mini screen).

If Apple used this resolution for the 5.5-5.7″ iPhone/iPhablet screen, it would mean that all the apps optimized for split-screen iPad functionality would automatically be optimized for the iPhone/iPhablet.

First time I’ve seen a multi-app proposal that actually looks like it could be from Apple. Definitely would see that being useful, easy to understand and seriously capable of upping Apple’s ‘post PC’ game.

Apple has pushed Autolayout during WWDC 2013. I thought they were preparing developers for a larger iPhone but multitasking is also a possibility.
I don’t think apps using autolayout are already multitasking compatible, I suppose some new API would be introduced to this purpose.
For example an API could ask the app for a specific viewcontroller to be placed side by side in a multitasking environment, and a special view controller could be used instead of the fullscreen one. For an hybrid app the iPhone layout, adapted (with autolayout) to a different size could be a good choice.
So most apps would not run in this scenario, while only a few of them, tailored for multitasking, would be able to be launched half screen. It would be an interesting feature

apple ipad’s multitasking wouldnt be thesame as there’s(non-apple split screen multitasking), rather, mac-like multitasking would come to ipad. juz like the recent tweak released by a developer under cydia.

I am one of the few who use the iPad for serious tasks. I use Cubasis for audio editing, Audiobus for join apps that need to be use at the same time andstuff like that. I never… and I mean never had the need to see two things in the same window. it is better fullscreen for max control. that’s my opinion. but maybe the 90% of users just read and browse the net.

Now that Apple is stealing ideas from the Microsoft Surface to put on the iPad, Apple is surely doomed. Microsoft has become the leader and Apple has become the follower. Oh, noes! This is all Tim Cook’s fault.

They are only copying from their selves since the Surface is a Copy of the iPad in the first place. (Android did copy but atleast they made their devices open sourced so that they are worth using). I would rather just get an iPad, a Keyboard and a case than get a Surface. Besides I am not biased unlike many Apple Users- I have 3 android tablets and an android phone.

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Before getting high and almighty on apple photocopying lets just wait and see how the solution will look like. Apple wont do multitasking w/o figuring it out thoroughly and makin it slick and intuitive. Being first is not the all-important issue, its doing it perfect. With hundreds of millions users and a service making it easy for the non-tech user to os-update it better be 100 per cent foolproof. Imagine the shitstorm if such a significant os-update would fail in any small way and for any small group of users! This aint something to take lightly.

Match Microsoft spilt screen? Not quite. A true multitasking environment does far more than just split screens. It optimizes a true production environment. So if you want to “match” it, tear the keyboard off a MacBook Pro and call it an iPad 6.

I wouldn’t be too shocked if Apple withheld this from the iOS 8 preview b/c it’s going to be an iPad Air 2/iMac mini Retina 2 exclusive… not because the earlier models aren’t buff enough but just because it makes a great selling point when you have not much else different for the new models other than Touch ID and under the hood stuff most people don’t understand.http://www.ipostbit.com/tips-and-tricks/ios/

If the split-screen forces snapping to specific ratios than that’s more like Windows 8. If the split-screen is supports ANY size that is more like Samsung’s TouchWiz. The sizeable floating video window is identical to TouchWiz.